After installing DevkitAdvance and fixing my makefile, I think I’ve got my GBA dev environment working properly. It can divide by 10, it doesn’t complain about things not being compiled with interworking, and the compiler doesn’t crash.

Finally! Now to finish the skeleton I’m producing and then make a real game with it.

Dinghy Instructor next week. Went out sailing yesterday for about six hours. I can definitely pick up moorings and come alongside things first time now. I’m also quite good at sailing around in circles which, apart from requiring you to have the ability to do six things at once, is bloody knackering! Bear away, sheet out, gybe, sheet in, tack, bear away, sheet out, gybe, get sheets stuck around legs, trip over centreboard, drop tiller extension, hit powerboat, get stuck head to wind. Our unique wind also meant you’d be all set up to nicely come alongside when a gust would hit and suddenly your boat would be fully powered up, screaming along towards a rather non-bendy jetty or powerboat engine.

This time I made a slightly better attempt at sailing a Wayfarer single-handed with a jib. Holding the jib sheets between your middle and ring finger, while holding the main between your thumb and first (of the same hand) means you can sheet each sail out individually, allowing you to dump the jib in a controlled manner. This method doesn’t require the use of your teeth to hold things :-)

Sailing backwards works too. About the only thing I’m not so sure of is sailing without a rudder (we’ll ignore trapezing and spinnakers - clipping myself to something that’ll capsize given half a chance seems a tad silly, as does hoisting a big parachute that really wants to wrap itself around your forestay and rip. Sailing fast is cool, especially when your boat planes, but hoisting spinnakers feels like too much faff).

Well, OK it isn’t… but the blue bird things in Chuckie now walk left and right along their platforms without falling off their edges.

Now trying to make them randomly decide to go up or down a ladder, and randomly get off the ladder. They seem to get stuck in a loop going up and down the same ladder forever. I’ll make them get ‘bored’ if this happens more than three times so they get off the ladder somewhere. I don’t think my random number generator is very random either…

It’s not quite working, but almost… I have the basic concept, it just needs fiddling with a little and a slight bug with my collision detection routine needs fixing too.

aha! the GBA has a weird memory layout… there’s 32k of RAM at 0×3000000 that aparrently lives in the processor, then 256k of external RAM at 0×2000000. The reason for my code going weird was because all the global variables and variables defined in your functions go into the internal 32k of ram… and it so happens that I’d filled it, overflowing into the next block of memory which is a memory map for all the GBA’s timers and other important bits.

There’s nothing like writing random stuff to important bits of memory, the effects can be quite quite random.

Solved the problem by using malloc() on all the big arrays (malloc() puts its things in the external RAM, so I shouldn’t run out) I have and making sure everything that never changes is declared ‘const’ so it lives in ROM.

Now to continue with the sprite engine…

There’s nothing to do… no groups in, no kids running around like loonies, high on sugar… nothing. Just this warden’s conference and a lot of nice food.

I go home on the 13th December, so I’m just finding things to do in the meantime to make time pass. It’s not that working here is getting boring, it’s just there’s bugger-all to do. What I’d really like is a big fat Internet connection, there’s a load of bookmarks of interesting looking websites I want to visit, but over my mobile it’ll run up a huge bill. I’ve also got loads of mad ideas for a game, but lack the knowledge to make it work (I’ve also only got half the game idea in my head too, I’m hoping my subconscious fills in the rest for me).

Hopefully I should get the mechanics of Chuckie finished soon, it almost saves the hiscores to the cart, there’s just a bit of weirdness with my hiscore sorting code that needs bludgeoning into submission. After that and the UI twaddle I just need to make the baddies work.

So yes, I’m going to spend my time finishing Chuckie’s UI twaddle and try to ignore the Damn Ladders which don’t work properly.

When I go home I’m going to grab loads of info on 3d maths and hopefully some of it will make sense to me. I think the GBA will be fast enough to run my 3d heightmap code…

Cool i can now collect eggs and birdseed in chuckie. I wrote a little bounding box collision detection thing. Now to end the level when all eggs are collected.
Seeing how i have my playstation i might try and make stuff work on that. Finding a compiler is tricky, will probably end up compiling gcc and getting in a mess.

Secret project at KML stage. 80/139 complete.

Midges are evil. On the other hand, I appear to have stopped reacting to
them - 10 minutes of itchy hell and then it stops and goes away. I now just wish I gave off a natural midge repellent so the buggers didn’t bite in the first place.

Took some kids (a whole three plus one leader) climbing this afternoon. We got bitten to death, and then rained upon… no, actually we got drenched. There was a nasty phase of being both bitten and rained upon which was doubly unpleasant.

Personal flame-throwers… we need those.

Chuckie progressing nicely, getting a little sprite system working. Need to see if it can handle more than one sprite and whether it grinds to a halt with more than three.

Went to the dentist for a filling. Sneaky bugger dentist had a syringe sticking out my gum before I had a chance to get comfy! I sat down, opened my mouth so he could look inside and stab (followed by a wiggle that I could feel!) in went some stingy and nasty tasting anaesthetic. Spent the rest of the day with a rubber cheek. Mutterings about wisdom teeth and their removal is being made… At one point he hit a nerve-ending that was still capable of sending a signal and I went ‘argh!’ so, instead of saying ‘bear with me, just another bit to go’ he whips out another syringe and jams it down the hole he’s just made in my tooth (plus another wiggle around the root of the tooth for good measure). Bloke must go through that stuff like it’s going out of fashion!

Secret keyboard-wearing-out project up to 60 out of 139. Chuckie needs
multiple sprites and a small sprite library creating.

The little yellow man in Chuckie can now jump! There’s no collision detection when he does jump, and the code is starting to turn into spaghetti, but the bloke jumps! He doesn’t hover, he doesn’t shoot up like a rocket, he goes boing like people in platform games should do.

Next on the list is tidying up the code and working out a slightly less kludgy way to slow him down.

Aha! Collision detection mostly works in Chuckie now. I had some code that slowed the little man down and it was messing everything up. The man now whizzes around the screen but collides with the floor properly. Now to work out how to make him move a bit slower.